Today’s Morning Buzz is brought to you by Dana Healy, Chief Operations Officer for Tightrope Media Systems. Connect with Dana on LinkedIn.
What I’m reading: Inclusive Design for Accessibility
What I’m watching: Need suggestions!
What I’m listening to: Government Video Podcast – Episode 9, Season 2
This year, I’ve traveled to conferences around the country and led several workshops to help local government teams prepare their video content for the upcoming WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) compliance deadlines. It’s been an honor to share what I know to help these teams navigate this time of transition, and I feel like I’m learning just as much as I’m teaching.
Like many people diving into this work, I started by presenting the checklist of requirements. Some items are familiar, like closed captioning on web videos, while others, like limiting flashes in videos, are less widely understood. But lately, I’ve noticed a welcome shift in the questions people ask.
Instead of asking what they need to do, they’re asking why it matters. People already know what an audio description is; now they want to know what makes a good one. They understand that enabling assistive technology and communicating meaning through it are two different layers of the process.
To explore that “why,” I recently spoke with Mathias Rechtzigel, a designer–engineer who has led accessibility work across federal, state, and local programs. Instead of focusing on compliance checklists, his approach centers on compassionate, resident-first delivery. Rechtzigel emphasizes that “accessible design is about habits of care. “Remember,” he says, “people trip on rocks, not mountains.”
In municipal communications, those “rocks” are often small oversights: unlabeled buttons, PDFs with missing tags, or alt text that describes what’s visible without explaining why it matters.
Seeing Meaning, Not Just Objects
Rechtzigel told me about a federal project where accessibility steps stopped at basic compliance. A climate scientist opened a presentation with an image of California hills on fire, framed against a retirement home, a visual meant to highlight the link between environmental change and the well-being of older adults. When the slide went through accessibility review, though, the alt text was reduced to a single word: fire.
Technically, that met WCAG requirements, but it stripped away the meaning.
A better version might have read:
“A retirement home in the foreground, California hills burning behind it, showing the threat climate change poses to older adults.”
That single sentence turned a compliant artifact into a communicative one that preserves both the emotion and the message for everyone, including screen reader users.
A similar lesson appeared in Rechtzigel’s accessibility work on emergency messaging for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, 988. When an announcement said, “nine-hundred-eighty-eight resources,” screen reader users didn’t realize it was a phone number, something they could call or text like 9-1-1. Clearer phrasing and correct markup solved the problem, ensuring a life-saving message was actually understood.
“Accessibility,” Rechtzigel said, “is really just a series of small, high-impact choices that reduce friction for your community without derailing your timelines or budgets.”
Design Philosophy: Remove the Rocks
Rechtzigel encourages teams to hunt for those tiny barriers that block progress at critical moments:
- A form that rejects hyphenated names
- An address field that can’t handle “½”
- A caption track is missing the support number on screen
Each of these is a small technical fix, but a major obstacle for the resident experiencing it. When you remove enough of these “rocks,” trust grows. Residents start recognizing your communications as thoughtful, respectful, and reliable.
Accessibility isn’t just about meeting technical standards. It’s about understanding the human experience behind every interaction. In an upcoming Part 2 of this article, we’ll explore how empathy and creativity help local government teams move from compliance to truly inclusive design.
In the meantime, hear how accessibility has evolved since the ADA’s passage. Listen to my recent discussion with WeCo’s Lynn Wehrman marking the 35th anniversary of the ADA, exploring how accessibility has expanded from physical spaces to the digital environment.